


Three Wrongs and a Right

by No_Illusions



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, But they come back, Gen, Happy ending though, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, M/M, No Beta, So much angst, Temporary Character Death, Torture, Whump, You've been warned, andy is mortal, as long as you don't dwell on what could have been, there are ridiculous amounts of misdirected guilt in this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-08-24
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:07:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26074660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/No_Illusions/pseuds/No_Illusions
Summary: What if Nile hadn't noticed the gun was empty before she abandoned the car? What if she had decided to stick with Andy and Booker until the others were safe?Here are three different ways it could have happened, and the one way it did.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 26
Kudos: 159





	1. 10 Years

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Characters are not mine!
> 
> A/N: Please see the end of the work (not just the chapter) for more notes.
> 
> Warnings: torture, violence, temporary character death, angst, ridiculous amounts of misdirected guilt

Nile dumps the gun and the car like Andy told her to, before catching the next train into London. She doesn’t look down as she removes the magazine, tossing the two pieces in opposite directions and not noticing that one of them is lighter than it should be. She doesn't realize her mistake.

It takes ten years before Nile decides she can no longer make excuses. Her mother and her brother are getting suspicious, concerned, confused. She hasn’t aged a day, and her little brother looks so much older than her now. She tells her mom about her skin routines, and her brother laughs at her, amazed, every time he sees her. But she can see their amazement darkening into something else, and she knows she has to leave before it becomes fear, resentment. 

Booker’s stories of his family haunt her dreams. 

But these ten years have been precious. Someone -- Booker, Nile thinks -- has apparently wiped her records enough that all her family knows, all she needs to tell them, is that something happened in Afghanistan. Something bad. No one asks, and no one judges her when she wakes up in her childhood bed screaming wordlessly. They think she dreams of desert sands and guns and blood. They do not know that she dreams of water and iron and drowning. 

Her mother and brother cherish her return. They push her to move on, to find a partner, to build her own life, but Nile refuses. She knows she will build a life, one day. This is only a blink, a moment in the eternity waiting for her. But this moment is precious, and she clings it with everything she has. 

Sometimes she thinks of the others. She wonders if Andy and Booker found Joe and Nicky, but she knows they did. She can imagine nothing that could have stopped them.

She wonders sometimes how she’ll find them again, when she’s ready. But she knows Booker is probably keeping an eye on her from a distance, and will reach out when she leaves. 

And then one night, she does leave, leaving behind a note and a whispered apology, and hears nothing. The only missed calls are from her mom and brother, for days. She doesn’t let herself regret what she has done, doesn’t let herself wonder if her choices have caused more pain for her family than if they’d merely thought she had died in that desert. After a week of shitty motels and waiting, she flies to England. Perhaps Booker will have an alert set up on her passport. 

Still, nothing. She didn’t plan for this, and Nile feels so terribly young, although she’s technically thirty-six now, a proper adult. She should have anticipated this, should have planned a way to get back in touch. But, she supposes, she has time. She has time to find them. The world can burn around them, and the five of them will be the only ones left standing. She’ll find them eventually.

A month into her search, she returns to the abandoned mine. Nothing has changed since they left it all those years ago. No one has been back, she thinks. 

She doesn’t stay long, because there’s no cell reception and Booker might call. 

Again, she thinks, _how did he have a signal?_

Curious, she looks up news reports from ten years ago. 

_A car was found, abandoned. Nearby was found an empty gun. Investigation pending._

An empty gun? Nile blinks, and feels the first stirrings of fear. 

__

She grits her teeth and returns to the last place she saw the others. When she bursts into his house and demands to know what happened here all those years ago, she finds a man, defeated. 

He sits down at his dining room table and tells her. 

“I can’t convince him to let them go,” he tells her miserably. “I can’t even convince him to release Andromache. He doesn’t care that she’s not immortal anymore.”

Nile’s blood runs cold. Copley drives her to Merrick’s headquarters. 

__

She shoots her way in. It’s been years since she used a gun, but immortality and fear and soul-crushing guilt are singing in her blood and she dies and dies and dies and it doesn’t matter, because she keeps getting up again. 

_I should never have left,_ she thinks to herself. _What have I done?_

It’s 2am and the lab is dark. She’s sure more guards are on their way, because she’s set off at least a dozen alarms, but for the moment it doesn’t matter. She flips on the lights, and freezes. 

The others are there, strapped to four examining chairs laid out next to each other. The lower halves of their bodies are covered in blue medical scrubs, but their torsos are bare. They’re all asleep, passed out, and don’t wake up as she stares in horror.

Booker is on the left. Nile feels a flare of anger as she looks at him, remembering Copley’s explanation of what had led them all to this moment. But the anger fades as she looks at this man who had so desperately wanted to die, and was still unable to. Behind him is a cabinet filled with samples, and Nile gags when she realizes that there are organs in there. Whoever cleaned up that evening had not done a good enough job, because she can see some streaks of blood on Booker’s neck and scrubs. 

Andy is next to him. She is asleep, her head tilted away from Booker. She looks older, and Nile knows that she _is_ older. There are lines on her face that hadn’t been there before. And worse, her torso, arms, neck are criss-crossed with scars. There are fewer samples in the cabinet behind her, and no whole organs, and Nile knows that what she sees on Andy’s skin is only a fraction of what the others must have suffered. 

Nicky and Joe are next to her, their condition similar to Booker’s, except that their heads are tilted towards each other as they sleep. She thinks back to that one night she spent with them all, before everything went to shit and she’d abandoned them, even unknowingly, to this fate. She thinks of the way Joe had slept tucked around Nicky, and the way Nicky had shielded Joe when she had woken them up with her nightmare. She wonders if they’ve been strapped to these tables, unable to reach each other, this whole time. Have they not touched in ten years?

She needs to wake them up, they need to get out of here, but the guilt swamps her for a moment. She should never have left, she should have checked the gun before she’d tossed it, she should have come back, she should have spared them this. She is afraid, afraid of their pain and their anger and her own guilt. 

_Was it worth it?_ She asks herself. _Those years with my family, were they worth_ this _? When all I have done is left both my new and my old families suffering anyways?_ Her mind shies away from the answer, because the answer is undeniably _no_.

Andy’s eyes open slowly as Nile undoes the straps holding her down. Andy doesn’t look at her, doesn’t twitch, just stares duly towards Nicky. This apathy terrifies Nile.

“Andy!” she exclaims, trying to get the woman to look at her. 

Slowly, Andy’s head turns, eyes focusing on her face.

“Nile?” the older woman whispers, and Nile has the horrible impression that it has been too long since Andy has asked her mouth to form words. When was the last time she spoke? The raspy sound of her voice, and some of the newer cuts on her torso, suggest that it’s been a long time since she did anything but perhaps scream. 

“Andy, I’m _sorry_ ,” Nile says, but she knows that this is no time to address her own guilt. They have to go. “I’m sorry, but you have to get up!” 

“Why?” asks Andy, looking confused. 

The others haven’t woken up yet, and Nile is horrified by this apathy. These people had been wide awake when she’d had one single tiny nightmare, and now they were sleeping through what could easily be a doctor coming to drag Andy away?

_They’ve all given up_ , she realizes. 

She shoves a gun into Andy’s hand. “Get up!” she snaps again, before moving to unbuckle Booker. 

Booker jerks awake and stares at her in absolute shock. She doesn’t speak to him, just turns away and moves towards Nicky and Joe. Andy hasn’t moved yet, but she doesn’t have time to deal with that now. _Christ_ , she thinks, _this escape is going so badly._

Joe and Nicky wake up simultaneously as she reaches for Nicky’s straps, and they both say her name with such gratitude and love that she almost bursts into tears. 

_Don’t you see?_ She almost asks. _This is my fault. I should have come for you years ago. Don’t thank me, don’t love me, this is my fault._

Once they are free, there is an instant in which Nicky and Joe just stare at each other. And then they launch themselves forward, stumbling --how long has it been since they last walked? -- and collapse to the floor in each other’s arms, not speaking, not kissing, just holding each other as though they cannot believe that this moment has finally come.

Nile turns back to Andy, who is staring at the ceiling, gun held loosely in her grasp. 

“Come on,” she tells her desperately. “Get up!”

“I can’t,” Andy whispers, and a single tear rolls down her cheek. “Everything hurts.”

“Booker, help me!” Nile snaps, and the other man throws himself off the table at her command, and together they help Andy up as she gasps and moans and whimpers, her body frail and unused to movement.

As they finally stumble from the lab, Booker and Joe supporting Andy while Nile and Nicky cover them, Nile hears Andy say “There will have to be a price.”

She thinks she’s talking to Booker, but wonders, _what price will I pay, for all of this?_

“There will have to be a price,” Nile whispers to herself, and holds the words to herself like a promise. _I will make it up to them. Somehow._ Except that she can't imagine how this can ever be alright.


	2. 1 Year

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: Characters are not mine!
> 
> A/N: Please see the end of the work (not just the chapter) for more notes.
> 
> Warnings: torture, violence, temporary character death, angst, ridiculous amounts of misdirected guilt

Nile dumps the gun and the car like Andy told her to, before catching the next train into London. She doesn’t look down as she removes the magazine, tossing the two pieces in opposite directions and not noticing that one of them is lighter than it should be. She doesn't realize her mistake.

She spends a year with her family before the need to know becomes unbearable. 

“I have to go,” she tells them one day. “There’s something I need to find out.”

They have so many questions, and she answers none of them.

She half expects a call from Booker when she lands in London, but none comes. She doesn’t know how to find them, so she starts at the abandoned mine. Nothing. She doesn’t stay long, the lack of cell reception creating a nagging sense of unease in the back of her mind. 

She doesn’t know how to get in touch with any of them. Do they even keep phones? Or are they using a constant string of burners? 

She just needs to know that they found Nicky and Joe. So she goes back to their only lead, and listens in horror as Copley recounts what he and Booker had done. Hours later Copley drops her off outside Merrick’s headquarters. 

Guilt twists in Nile’s gut, but she lets the rage override it as she shoots and dies and shoots and dies. How dare these people treat others as lab rats. How dare Copley sell them out. How dare Booker betray them.  _ How dare I abandon them to this fate. _

When she busts into the lab, three men are dragging Joe off of a table, as Nicky screams his name and the others try desperately to comfort him. Joe is unconscious -- dead? -- and she doesn’t know where they’re taking him and doesn’t wait to find out. 

Four quick shots later, and the three guards and the blond scientist are dead, and Andy and Booker are gaping at her while Nicky calls Joe’s name in increasing desperation. 

She goes to Joe first, where he’s laying slumped on the ground. He’s got on hospital scrub pants, but his torso is bare, as are the others’. Only Andy has on a top. Now that she’s closer, she sees past the blood coating his torso to a great gash on his chest, and -- she gags -- is he missing a kidney? 

Nicky’s screaming Joe’s name in the background, and Nile half-recognizes some of the Arabic pouring from his lips, interspersed with what might be Italian. 

“Come on, Joe,” she murmurs. 

And then Joe gasps back into wakefulness, flinching away from her even as he lets out a strangled moan, breathing heavily and gasping as his body begins to regrow what it had lost. He looks around frantically, not seeming to see her, and Nile rushes to Nicky and unstraps him from the table. Nicky throws himself towards Joe, sobbing, and Nile looks away from the overwhelming intimacy of two lovers who haven’t touched in a year. 

She goes to Andy next, and Andy is staring at her in what is almost awe as Nile undoes the straps holding her down. 

“You came back,” Andy says. 

“I didn’t know!” Nile tells her. “Andy, I didn’t know until today that anything had gone wrong, I swear it, or I would have come immediately!” 

“I know, kid,” Andy whispers, her voice hoarse and her lips cracking. “I know you would have.”

Nile tries not to look at the scars she can see criss-crossing Andy’s arms and neck, tries not to look at the rows and rows of sample jars she can see in fridges than run the length of the lab. She tries not to imagine what has happened here for the last year as she has been basking in her stolen time.

She tries not to think to herself,  _ I did this. This was my cowardice, as much as Booker’s. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please see end of work for more notes.


	3. An Eternity

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: Characters are not mine!
> 
> A/N: Please see the end of the work (not just the chapter) for more notes.
> 
> Warnings: torture, violence, temporary character death, angst, ridiculous amounts of misdirected guilt

Nile doesn’t take the car, or the gun. She can’t do it, even more than she can’t face the idea of killing anyone else. She remembers Joe’s laugh and Nicky’s smile and how kind they both were after her nightmare, and she knows that she can’t leave them in danger. No matter how capable Andy and Booker are, she can’t walk away from this until she knows the others are safe. Then she’ll go home.

She grits her teeth, and follows Andy into Copley’s house, Booker bringing up the rear. 

Andy confronts Copley, and then there are two bangs, and the world goes black. 

Nile gasps into wakefulness to feel bits of her brain on the outside of her head for the second time in twenty-four hours. Except this time, it’s not Andy standing over her. It’s Copley, and in the background Andy is screaming at Booker, and Nile finds that her hands are zip-tied behind her back, and she realizes what has happened. 

There’s nothing she can do as she discovers in horror that Andy’s no longer immortal, and nothing she can do as Merrick’s men inject them with something, and nothing she can do as the world fades to black and she feels herself being lifted off of Copley’s blood-soaked rug.

__ 

She doesn’t know what to say as Joe screams at Booker, and Nicky begs Joe to be quiet, and Andy stares at the ceiling with her chin trembling as she tries not to cry. Nile doesn’t know what to do, so she does nothing, silent tears slipping down her cheeks until Nicky notices and calls her name. But there is nothing he can say to make this better.

__

They try to shelter her for as long as possible, but that isn’t very long. 

She’s the only female immortal Kozak’s got, and the mad doctor wants her blood and her DNA and her organs and everything else. Nile screams and cries until she can’t anymore, until she dies and her body heals and she wakes up and does it all over again. 

At first, Joe and Nicky tell her stories, but they stop when they realize that Kozak is listening in. Nile understands. The last thing she wants is that mad woman to know anything about them.

“I’m sorry, Nile,” Booker tells her. “I tried to stop the others from coming to find you.” Both of them know that this is the shittiest excuse in the world, so Nile doesn’t bother to respond.

Andy has been silent for days, except for the sounds she makes when Kozak cuts into her, always careful to stop her from bleeding out or dying of shock. 

Nicky and Joe are trying. They’re trying to hold it together, but they fall apart every time they hear each other scream, and Nile knows they can’t keep this up forever. They try to tell her it will be alright, but none of them believe it. 

_ So this is immortality, _ she thinks to herself, and laughs until she cries. 

__

The days and the weeks and the months and then the years blur together until Nile has no idea how much time has passed. She can see the lines around Andy’s eyes and mouth, that speak to aging and the approaching death of Andromache the Scythian. 

_ Lucky _ , a part of Nile thinks, before the rest of her squashes the thought. But she knows that Andy is lucky, in this scenario. Death would be a gift, and it is somehow a gift that she has not yet earned. 

Nile prays. She knows Nicky does too, because she can hear him muttering Latin to himself sometimes as Kozak cuts into him. Nile holds onto her faith because it is the only thing she  _ can _ hold onto.

___

The ten year anniversary of their capture comes and goes, and none of them notice. Still, Kozak cuts into them, and still they scream. This is their fate. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please see end of work for more notes.


	4. Dreams

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: Characters are not mine!
> 
> A/N: Please see the end of the work (not just the chapter) for more notes.
> 
> Warnings: torture, violence, temporary character death, angst, ridiculous amounts of misdirected guilt

Nile’s sobbing when she jerks into wakefulness, tears streaming down her face as she gasps out apologies. 

“Nile? What’s wrong?” Nicky asks. 

Nile chokes on a sob as she tries to get her breath under control. To her left, Nicky is tucking his gun back under his pillow as Joe rubs his eyes to wake himself up. To her right, Andy is sitting up and watching her warily, obviously expecting this to be another dream about Quynh. 

But it wasn’t. 

Nile gasps and gasps as she tries to get her breathing under control, until Joe is there, rubbing circles on her back and murmuring to her in what she thinks is Arabic. She shudders and sobs and tries to find the words to tell them what she feared. 

After a few more moments, she has herself under control, and looks towards Andy with desperation in her eyes. 

“What if I hadn’t come back?” she whispers. “What if I hadn’t realized that gun was empty? Merrick could have kept you in that lab for  _ years. _ ”

She feels Joe tense beside her, and knows without looking that he’s turned to Nicky, making sure the other man is alright. 

“We would have found another way,” Andy tells her. 

“No,” says Nile, with absolute certainty in her voice. “You wouldn’t have.” Andy looks away, and Nile sees that she knows this is true. It would have taken a miracle for them to escape that lab.

“This is what you dreamed?” Nicky’s voice is calm, but Nile knows him well enough to hear the tension in his voice.

“Yes,” she whispers. “Oh god, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s ok,” Joe tells her. “It didn’t happen. You came back, and you got us out.”

“But it was so close! If I hadn’t glanced down at just the right moment…”

Nile blinks her eyes, trying to clear away the images dancing before her eyes. 

“And if I hadn’t left,” she whispers, “Booker would have shot me in the head and I would have been in that lab too.”

She can feel the others exchanging looks over her head, trying to figure out what to say. She gulps.

“Could you ever have forgiven me?” She directs this question to Nicky, although she doesn’t quite understand why. Perhaps it’s because it was Nicky who decided on Booker’s punishment. “If I had left you there for ten years while I was off with my family? Ten years of watching Joe tortured, unable to reach him or touch him? Ten years of watching Andy age and accumulate scar after scar?”

She is terrified of the answer. Nicky looks at her for a long moment, weighing this question. This, she realizes, is the other reason she asked Nicky and not either of the others. Nicky will give her an honest, genuine answer. 

“I think,” Nicky says slowly, “That I would have very mixed feelings about it. Rationally, I would not blame you. Irrationally, however, I would be desperate and afraid and traumatized. With time, I would be able to let go of those irrational feelings. And, Nile, we would have time.”

Nile nods. She doesn’t feel completely better, but she appreciates the honesty. 

“Come,” Joe tells her, standing up and reaching out a hand. “I think it’s time you try my hot chocolate.”

“We’ll meet you in there,” Andy tells him, and Joe gives Nicky a hand up instead. 

Nile waits, looking at her boss. Once the others are gone, Andy looks at her seriously. 

“I think I understand what you’re asking, better than they do,” she says. “It’s the guilt of not looking that is haunting you. How close you came to not looking for us.”

Nile nods, eyes widening in understanding. 

“Yes,” Andy says, seeing her look. “I do not know if Quynh will ever forgive me. I don’t know if she should forgive me.”

A couple tears roll down Nile’s cheeks, and Andy smiles at her sadly. 

“It’s not a helpful answer, I know,” she says. “But there isn’t a good answer. We got lucky. We all got terribly lucky, first that you left and then that you came back. And even before that, we got lucky that you came along after Booker made his deal with Copley, but before Copley could capture us. Nicky might call it fate, or destiny. I don’t know anymore.”

Andy pauses, clearly thinking through what she wants to say next. 

“I was surprised,” she continues, “When you came back for us. I had given up on the world, and I thought the world would give up on me in turn. But now I know you. You are careful, Nile, and you are kind. You would not have missed that the gun was empty, because you pay attention to details, and you would not have failed to come for us once you knew we were in trouble. And it was your loyalty to family that first led you to leave, and then your care for both their pain and ours that led you to return. 

“I don’t think it was luck that this hinged on. I think it hinged on you. And you are steady, and loyal, and brave, and kind, and careful. You would always have noticed the gun, and you would always have saved us. You’re a good kid, Nile, and that’s why we got out of that lab when we did.”

Nile’s crying as Andy smiles at her.

“Come on, kid. Joe really does make excellent hot chocolate, and he’ll scold us if we let it get cold.”

And when Andy pulls her to her feet and wraps an arm around her shoulder, Nile finds that she doesn’t have to force the smile onto her face. And she knows, with utter certainty, that she won’t dream of the lab again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N:
> 
> So this was an interesting thing to write, and odd, because in a lot of ways I think it would be out of character for Nile to *not* notice that the gun was empty, or to decide to stay with Andy and fight rather than leaving to go back to her family. I think that those choices are so integral to Nile's character in the movie, that to change those choices is to change her character. 
> 
> That being said, they are small choices, decisions made in an instant that could easily have been different. This is an exploration of those potential differences, with the recognition that I don't think it was only luck that led Nile to making the decisions she did. I think she needed to leave Andy and Booker to go find her family, because Nile is young and she loves her mom and her brother and she is completely overwhelmed by the thought of never seeing them again. 
> 
> But at the same time, I think that if she had made it back to them, only to have to leave later, she might have regretted it. She would have gained however many years, but spent the entire time knowing that she was building up to a painful separation that would break their hearts (in this scenario, I am choosing not to consider the version of this where she comes clean to her family about her immortality, and they either accept or reject her). I think she would have felt guilt when she finally had to leave, guilt at causing them this pain when she could have given them a clean break years ago (even though they, too, would have gained years with her). Whether that guilt would be justified or rational can be debated, but I do think she would have felt it. And it would have been compounded further if she found out the team had been trapped in Merrick's lab the entire time.
> 
> But Nile's caution and self-awareness are also part of her character, as is her extensive combat training and experience as a Marine. Nile has instincts and trusts them, and follows her intuition. I think she would always have noticed that the weight of the gun was off when she removed the magazine, even if she didn't automatically glance down. 
> 
> And so in some ways, this is purely a thought exercise, because Nile's character as it is created in the movie could only have made the choices that she made. And this is what Andy tries to tell her in the final chapter.

**Author's Note:**

> Please see end of work (not just chapter) for more notes.


End file.
